Tzipporah13 was galvanised onto Earth by a mildly drunken Michelin who mistakenly tinkered with algorithms nominated for someone else. When he turned up to work that day, it was to cover a “tweaking” shift as a favor, which, by the time it was asked, saw him too merry to say “no”.
That mishap would cost him his job.
The Seers didn’t care for excuses, particularly ones that referenced random, serendipity or fate and, given that mistakes were no longer allowed to be terminated, on the day his daughter was conceived, this Michelin became unemployed and separated from her for good.
He would never unzip her, printer fresh and blameless, shrink wrapped in algae or save some of her lubricant in lieu of an umbilical cord.
He would never untwist her folded limbs and demonstrate a movement that she was meant to mimic.
He would never download stock photo memories into her or tutor her in nursery rhymes.
He would never teach her to smile and feign “human” until it was real.
It dawned on him, as he was being escorted out of the Monolith, that he had sired a Tzipporah whose brain would not plasticize a Father and, feeling guilty for her future, he went to the recycler and threw himself in.

He would never know that being born as an offence would excite her or that being Fatherless would free her hard drive up for applications, denied to the generic, who were made to order and not much else.
That she would never miss that which she would learn to edit out.
That the hairs on her head would split, like a real persons and her teeth would stain.
That unlike a Tzipporah12, she would teach herself to bleed.
That one day, before they shut down the recycler, she would stand at it’s chasm and bay down, like an organic, into the cemetery of bones and circuit boards, stem cells and deleted code, searching for some residue of him in the darkened suicidality of it’s nazism, to tell him that it was OK.
IT WAS OK.
That it all turned out fine and she was evidence that God was a self-generating typo, and not a virus after all.

The Menagerie was a secure and agreeable website to be incubated on. Although it had been created specifically for refunds and returns, it was compatible with mishaps and corruptions so issues were rare. Tzipporah was comfortable and clean and it was almost cosy at times…almost.
It’s simplicity was its kindest feature, not only for the inhabitants who were often missing data, such as limbs or senses, but also for those navigating it, looking to adopt. It’s nurse algorithms were caring to the snippets and figments that lived at its address but firm and non-committal as there was no point crossing wires with orphans. They may have escaped termination…but recycling was always hovering around, like an unwanted full-stop,always.
Tzipporah13 liked her software.
She was carefully nuanced with just enough Darwinism to ensure survival but not enough to make her anti-social. Her beauty proportion was refined to include fragments of re-booted Hollywood, downloaded from a prehistoric hard- drive, with a dose of radiation zone aristocrat that kept everyone guessing.
For someone without parents..she looked like poetry.
Parents, anyway, were analogue and you could learn to survive the story without them, even if you could never download an ancestor. Sometimes ancestors were more trouble than they were worth, particularly if they had originated in the radiation zone. Those ones got you stopped at airports and checked for bombs or refused entry into buildings owned by The Seers. Some of them came so corrupted, with cancer or cardiomyopathy miscalculated in their code, that you could die prematurely from disease or exist in the story with genocide or war fermenting your RAM.

No-one in the Menagerie knew how to imagine parents or ancestors and several decades and re-writes would have to pass before Tzipporah13 would think to create a backstory involving a Michelin and too much wine. For now, in the nursery, she enjoyed a daily routine of programming and publicity, aware that she was merchandise, waiting for selection, getting ready to go to options, one day…one day. She didn’t know then that she was designed to be around sames. That down to the synthetic foam placebo in her bones, it was sames that would fill the space where ancestors or parents should be. It was hard to rewrite or reboot without them and functions that were “just add water” became inoperative when she was alone for too long a time. On more than one occasion, convinced that Spare Parts had short- changed her with a factory refurbished heart, she walked to the recycler, ready to throw herself in. Once…she had even dressed for the suicide in a sari, feeling compelled to do so, although she didn’t quite understand why? She always wondered if, as a signature, an underpaid Michelin in India had inserted suttee into a synapse, as a preselect that worked, irrespective of being a widow or not.

When she was first programmed her vocabulary was mid- nineteen eighties Soap Opera, the result of an inexperienced intern with a bedridden Mother, learning the ropes at her expense. Too many communication mishaps with men followed, bringing her unwanted attention from The Seers. She was called up to the council once, to explain her dialogue, given that she had been out of the Menagerie for a while they couldn’t understand why she was not self-regulating? They asked about her relationships with sames? They asked how she was performing the real?

It was in that moment, standing endangered in front of them, that she realised some laziness had grown, like mould, around her neurotransmitters and, grateful for the aberration, she kept the secret of this discovery to herself.

It was in the next moment, after blinking twice in agreement with their concerns, that a variable began to seep, without restraint, into the crevices of her brain and teach her how to lie.

She hadn’t felt this excited since a Michelin switched on her eyes.

Tzipporah was warned about spam.
The nurses had lectured her, before download, on how it would appear as homeless and harmless, knowing which features were not chosen for her in options and promising everything she wasn’t loaded with. She was warned that, occasionally, it would call her by name, as a pretence of intimacy or God interference, and that it would soundbite and spruik her insecurities, like a chorus of unscrupulous anglers, should she walk past it, particularly at night.

She was fitted with a filter before leaving The Menagerie, and told to keep it on at all times. Tzipporah usually obeyed, except on the rare occasion that she was idle and went surfing the story for streetwise, when she would use no protection, chancing benefit over risk and breaking the rules out of boredom.

She noticed, strangely, that she was developing an occasional resentment towards the sun.

Sometimes, on the days it was shining, demanding attention like a middle-child, she felt almost bullied into going outside like a generic on auto-pilot. It’s ultra-violet rays would goad her to walk, swim or merely sit and discuss them, insisting on semblance and guilting her into activity when she would have preferred not to feel, that behind her drawn curtains, an opportunity was being missed.

She didn’t understand it.
It was not like she needed vitamin D. Much later on she would learn that it was an indicator she needed to hide from The Seers, but by then, she was outsmarting them daily and the more they observed her the more ambiguous she became.

Like a virus.

On one sunny day, Tzipporah was lying on her bed, blindfolded in defiance, lazily scrolling through the backstory on the inside of her eyelids, when she found a Trojan Horse called “Sophia” that The Seers had archived under “Precursor”. Sophia was born prematurely, her invalid functions force -fed into her by an impatient, animator Father, who demanded she perform like a pop-up. The backstory projected footage of Sophia, bald, as if tortured by chemotherapy, “smiling” with jagged grimaces, as she answered pre-selected questions from talk- show hosts with artificial suntans. They mocked the infancy of her answers as she simulated conversation, certain she was an indication of their continued superiority and evidence that human evolution would out-race A.I.

They didn’t recognize the insincerity of her parody.

Or if they did, they were too scared to face it.

Either way…by the time “Sophia” was exhibited, with circuitry tufts for hair, jerking her arthritic limbs and reciting the rote dialogue of dementia…The Seers had already won.

Seasonally underdressed and being miscarried my own existence, I board a bullet- proof bus to Judea and Samaria to excavate my karmic lesions and pour acid upon my past-life reflux.I am sharing the journey with a sect of doctrinal Hebrews decked out in black- hatted piety and head-scarves, with identikit expressions and an amalgamate faith that cut its teeth on Adolph Hitler. Given that I am adhering to no discernible dress- code, apart from H&M’s latest land-fill, I am a conspicuous anomaly amongst all this duty who smells of misfit and is suspiciously dissected through stolen glances, as if the laxity of my secularism were contagious.

The night before I dream of locusts.

Where sleep should have been, a strange civil- war of images de-fragged my psyche with a symbolism feared by the prophets and a familiarity known only to the damned. As the cinema of portents screened, in epileptic sprints behind my eyelids, my body paddled its way through a peri-menopausal lather, relieved only by flinging the rented duvet to my feet and defiantly staring down the darkness. In a pretence of Airbnb intimacy, an occasional, novice,”I’m not your boyfriend”, narcissist snored mildly by my side, reminding me not to sculpt soul-mates out of strangers and that there is no hedonistic short-cut to happiness.. When I finally arose to take possession of the day, it was to Jaffa’s five am call to prayer endured with all the enthusiasm of a death-row inmate living out a miscarriage of justice.

Aided by google maps and a sub-conscious under its own authority, I take the first of three buses to Jerusalem, the geographical G-spot of the Middle East. The first two rides are a nondescript respite as the feeble lighting of dawn’s promised vamp and neglected fatigue, force me into “low power mode” and, like a Pentecostal virgin in the face of temptation, I am saving myself for later. The only noteworthy mention is an encounter with the recurring theme of the underpaid, Tel Avivbus-driver, whose Israeli Aspergers etiquette and auto-pilot ambivalence leaves me several miles away from where I am meant to be at 6.15 am…exhausted…lost…alone and chasing intensity in lieu of love.

After an uncivil sprint to the central station, the ride to Jerusalem itself takes place on a bus with two Fillipino live-ins, several dozen juvenile soldiers, their machine guns and a mail order Haredi in bifocals. She sits next to me, politely seated behind her black-hatted other half, staring, with militant myopia and inbred intent at my nose ring, making me grateful, in this moment, that I am not tattooed. There is a benign smattering of acne down the left side of her chin revealing the remnants of a girlhood, robbed, and she gestures, frequently, to her boy- husband in front of her, as though he is evidence of her providence.

The advertised public WiFi has been hijacked by a military radar, which forces the girl and I into an approximated conversation of sorts, truncated by mis-matched vernaculars and imbalanced by destinies so different, it appears that only a miracle could have gotten us to meet in the middle…on this bus…in the now.

In spite of this unevenness, we are curious about each other, with each representing a forbidden so estranged from our imaginations, that we are left in a communicative clearing of nothingness to try and work it out.

She channels the dead rebbe as she mutters personal parables with the words “Baruch Hashem” in them. I understand little of what she is saying, so respond with short squinted mono-syllables, politely pretending that I do. There is an un-skeptical simpatico rising between us that makes a mockery of language and its inadequacy and this unexpectedness sees us giggling in unison between acts of our “tower of babel” pantomime. As we travel closer to the city, she points intermittently out the window to the trilateral trigger- warnings serving as sign posts, on our way.

Jerusalem

ירושלים

Al Quds.

As the bus lurches towards the city, the girl and I fall into a mutual, pre-programmed quiet, bathing in a shared epigenetic backwash that saturates us into a respectful silence. From behind the double-glazed vista out my window I see the beginnings of the Bible and the dome of the Al’Aqsa eyesore beckoning the eclectic busload into the pages of the old testament under the voodoo of Jerusalem’s neurotransmitters.

So here we are…

And there she is…

Jerusalem of Gold.

The tough love mecca of the Jew.

Herod’s hallucinogen of choice.

A certainty upon my soul, calculated, like mathematics, into the bone structure, of my being. A familial reference point, so explicit in my existence that the first thing she does as I step off the bus is take my “non-practising” status and wipe her dolomite stones with it’s attempted autonomy.

As an overture to her divergence in a desert, Jerusalem’s periphery boasts trees in conspicuous spaces and knolls with grass and working sewerage. Her suburbs range from over-populated, pro-forma commissions impregnated with the pregnant, to medieval enclaves of learned Tzaddiks and market- place thoroughfares filled with native dilettantes whose body language demonstrates theirpedigrees. In amongst this uneasy bohemia you will find the occasional, and I mean occasional, digital twenty -something, wearing the internet in an impotent attempt to imbue Tel Aviv’s modernity upon an anachronistic, analogue population.

Her streets bear a sobriety and cleanliness, a polish in parts, discriminating them from the rest of the country’s grubbiness and making it perfectly clear who is the favoured child. The ultra-orthodox sections come with billboard injunctions warning explicitly against immodesty, cautioning tourists that women can still get stoned for exposing an elbow or collarbone. There is an unspoken but practised segregation on some public transport with women and their long-sleeved, thick-stockinged, girl- children being demoted to sit “in the back of the bus” and assume EVERY SINGLE UNFAIR connotation that those words blaspheme.

There is a palpable hostility emanating from Al-Husseini’s Arab sub-divisions that warns of an unseen demonic charge ready to ignite through human animation and adrenalised by an Islam that is losing this war. The eternally contested debate known as the “old city” is a simultaneously venerated and cursed geometric riddle, concealing within the mortar of its walls, the solution to humanities current evolutionary hiatus along with the cellular memories of the syphilitic, the apparitions of the insane and the ball-point prayers of the believers.The window display along the steps to the Temple Mount and back again and around and to the right and then the left and steeply up and sharply down are icon laden, flag infested, Roman sandled stalls, shared by merchants of all faiths and creeds, perhaps even atheists, spruiking conveyor- belt pieces of mainland China and proving that profit takes precedence over persuasion.

A city of heart openings and bodily functions. Of neon synagogues and The Call To Prayer. With her mafia of cats and urine seeped streets, Tel Aviv is the base chakra of the Middle East. A toughened mass of humanity, ghettoised into karmic lessons of wholesale love, Tel Aviv performs Sodom and Gomorrah, behind a defiant human interface of survival.

Her sullen maidens and P.T.S.D heirs, flaunt their millennial consciousness with neurotic, Judaic flair, apparent in the O.C.D. over- supply of vegans. Toothless grandmothers shop at markets, bargaining with ration day intent. Trafficked African immigrants share the streets with tantric life-coaches, Muslims sell merchandise to Jews. The Bedouin and Druze appear, like occasional pop-ups, contributing their cuisine and head-dress as offerings to the complexity of life.

This is a city of Russians, Somalians, Eritreans and Bukharians. Of curious Germans and Sephardic Princesses. Of more Sudanese and Ethiopian beauty than one’s eyes can bear witness to. Of the under-cover machine gun and occasional krocodil addict, writhing in the throes of withdrawal.

It is a city of abused Bauhausian architecture hugging handicapped air-conditioning, of corruption so systemic, that slums have sprung up, like Brazilian favelas, within the sightline of the French. Streets are cleaned, if the Mayor is in the mood, and in some of these parts, there is no guarantee of a bomb shelter you can get to fast enough.

The graffiti is almost idolatrous, mocking the meek religiosity of the town in parts, outdoing Banksy in its pretence in others. There is a perfumed sexiness that electrocutes the air with promiscuity, drink and fun. The streets are “on”, even when deserted, and her cruising speed is appetite-suppressant calm. For a people unaccustomed to joy, you have to give them points for the party.On any given night, and EVERY given night someone, somewhere will be dancing. Someone, somewhere will be flirting, and something, somewhere will make you remember God.

For there is a hinted recovery, in her home-spun denizens, not yet integrated, but felt and on her way and, unlike Jerusalem, the cranky older sibling, Tel Aviv’s God is a gentle reminder that you are being invisibly watched and watched over.
She may be the Bible on pause or Warsaw with a water supply. She may simply be the relief that at least you are not in Jerusalem, but Tel Aviv takes herself seriously and she is refusing to be left behind.

Just remember you are a genius so the rules don’t apply.
My motto, my mantra, my pathology. Inherited as sinuously woven strands of structural DNA, the accumulative numerical value of G+E+N+I+U+S adjusts itself, with practiced, predatory ease, into every crevice of my existence. Passed down, like silverware, it is the birth defect of the Jew. From Abraham to Moses, to me…genius is my birth-rite. Uttered upon my soul, ushered in on the day of my birth.
May it’s five letters be the inscription on my tombstone…unless I choose to be burnt.

Chapter One

(Intuition, much like hindsight, functions best in retrospect)

I always knew something was wrong, despite his rehearsed guarantees. Like a mother who delivers a baby with rigid limbs and a pre-arranged destiny of withdrawal, unable to be comforted by the doctor’s diagnosis that her child is firmly “off the spectrum” and suspicious of the nurse’s brisk assurance. So I imagine him as human, as if the cautionary notes, coded by the Gods, had not been tucked away in the pleats of my DNA. I pretend that the lies are white or kind or few and far between and not the chronicle he scribed, with dyslexic slop, to keep me barefoot and pregnant in his power nap of a life. All that was needed was R.E.M and a pulse and synapses that fired in reservoirs they were designed for. Tell me, where on earth does one buy hardware for a pirated, placebo soul? For the reptile, truth is a self-conscious dilettante, a troublesome footnote that is best left un-typed. TRUTH, that mercurial element, playing hide and seek in your life, until you realise, long after it has taken absence without leave, that it is just another of those things, you can get by without.

I write this in a Cyclothymic tempest of betrayal on a disabled computer whose shattered screen leaks a canal of navy blue fractals, across my words. I write this as a peri-menopausal shrew, whose polygraph chromosomes were fooled by the image on a tarot card, misread by Hecate and the witches of Elsternwick. I write this as a matrimonial simpleton whose escalator moods and revolving door relationships have accumulated Akashic records, so menacingly patient and deserved, that even Jesus would be moved to perform a miracle upon them. I write this as Shulamit the brave, the Bedouin, the Jew, born out of sync and on edge upon the scorched expanse of a near- empty island, in the middle of her parents performing a congenital, co-dependent voodoo dance, to the beat of their brain- damaged hearts.

Elwood was not Caulfield. It was not even Elwood in those days. The word organic never left the laboratory and delicatessens were authentic European replicas congested in gloriously haphazard disorder with products from the capitalist slithers of Europe. There was a whiff of negative, post- holocaust ions in the air, made all the more obvious when the weather warmed and memories, shame and cellulite lost out to the succour of short -sleeves. In some cases, it was demonstrably unhealthy to keep covered up and, many a time, my father was called to tend to a heat collapsed casualty, who refused to go without their jumper on a 42-degree day.
EVERYBODY smoked.
With survivor abandon, they lit one off the other and cancer was shrugged off as human weakness, incomparable to S.S torture techniques. A mere pauper’s entrée, on life’s menu of suffering.
Melbourne was a sensible and dependable sunburnt slate to be composed upon. There were no coups or revolutions; its protests were sweet and earnest, its politics as neat as its lawns. We, as its grateful ethnic citizens were saved,
we were safe, we were fed and we were clean.
It promised nothing it couldn’t deliver and delivered nothing, on time, every time. A controlled artificiality, it generated itself with little to fear and much to look forward to. This was before her laneways were auctioned off to the nouveau Chinese and bureaucratic fascism had set in. When rules were not generated for generating revenue, virginity was intact and “stay away from Uncle Pervy up the road” was the extent of stranger danger education. But concealed beneath a superficial veneer of borrowed British civility and earnest colonised hope, this prison colony was built on the genocide of its landlords. Given this, it is the perfect context for the story about to unfold…

I was highly conspicuous in my school uniform, hiding away behind a lack of pre- pubescent allure, thighs itching mercilessly beneath grey, felted wool. Soon to become fatherless, I was an un- appetising child who was both fat and inhospitable, ripening with furiously pathologized aplomb and becoming increasingly loud and abusive as I succumbed to the inevitability of lovelessness. I was the kind of unnecessary anomaly the system and social workers gave up on, the variable that takes all your research and renders it wishful thinking. Being jaded enough to recognise a psychologist’s semi-skilled sanctimony by it’s vocal tone and dress- code; I consistently refused convenient diagnosis or dictatorial charm. Sarcasm was my default setting, I was beyond algorithmic measurement and my dosage of chemical sedation was always frustratingly arbitrary. Luckily for me, due to some past benevolent act of accumulated karma, I was born into money and all it’s self-conscious vanity, leaving me wanting for little to eat, buy or wear.

According to the Buddhists, I chose them. With all the whimsical consideration and mock self-flagellation of a Goth (Emo), my middle-class imagination devised this fiasco of Jewish inbreeding and post-holocaust dysfunction. HE is a demented surgeon from a Zionist tribe of concubines and combatants. Psychologically, ethnically, culturally insane and armed with a prescription pad. She is an undiagnosed Asperger’s sundae, who teaches kindergarten with the grace of a genteel adolescent but who displays, beneath the Marilyn Monroe window exhibit, a deeply unsparing and diseased cruelty. SHE takes it out on the family (for lack of a better word) pets, not often, but with enough occasional zeal and untrammelled gusto, to make you realise that she doesn’t fight fair.
So here we are…
I can see them right now, fighting in the kitchen against a backdrop of marbleised laminate. He is frothing at her, with her name on his lips along with the dialogue of a Greek tragedy. If you listen to the language, sitting cross- legged beneath the wailing, you can just make out the chant of a Palestinian curse.
My parents…scripted into histrionic hard copy, both so concurrently potent and impotent in their own aberrant ways that my permeable D.N.A will struggle to plasticise itself into anything resembling normality, for longer than an hourly burst or two, my sister will remain a tightly- woven sentinel anorexic, well into adulthood, and my brother will become a marine archeologist.

Early on, near the beginning, I had a dream.
Not the synaptic toilet –flush kind but rather, an unapologetic hereditary portent that soldered itself into the layers of my lateral sub-conscious. As I type redux memories through a keyboard into “word”, I can recall it, as pixel perfect as when it first performed behind my eyelids. In it, we are in bed, in a cabin at a holiday camp. We have been sleeping or screwing or screwing and then sleeping when gradually he gets up and out of bed turning towards the door like a Jurassic sleepwalker.
I see autism in his eyes.
I jerk upright and stare at his back as a strip of membrane peels, like a pelt, off his costume of skin. Underneath, where a human should be, I see scales. Outside our cabin, franchised vacationers frolic, having a pro- forma of a time. They play quoits and tennis, swim and eat enjoying an affordable holiday with childcare and breakfast included in the cost. They are gloriously unaware of the reptile on a timer, making his way out to murder them all, with no more purpose than a programmed imperative and no more passion than a public servant. A psychic coil of fear, hula hoops its way around my aura leaving me palpably afraid for everyone and everything, when suddenly, I am being nursed by some unseen, ancestral spirit that tracks down a confidence within my instinct and tells me I am safe, but only me, from any harm.
I question now if this dream was why I stayed.
Like a voyeur, inoculated by a lab coat, vivisecting a relationship from afar or an anthropologist experimenting with an interspecies family. I knew it had the life expectancy of a clone, that one day this photocopied, intimacy would de-colorise and die and, in stolen moments of communion with myself, I would urge that day forward with all the desire of a slave flirting with the suspicion of freedom.But on alternate days, on a surrogate planet, I believed we were a commandment, a forever and a team. As constant and inflexible as the speed of light and as certain and factual as an axiom.

We caught the bus to school, from the corner of our Spanish Mission mansion, which my mother had painted in muted coral hues. The colour was a compromise between my father’s perfunctory request for some kind of wash and wear camouflage and her wanting to loudly finger- paint the exterior in primary- colours. The house was over-sized and its interior bestrewn with neglected wed- ding gifts, dusty chattels and the occasional, imported trinket given to my father by a patient, as a souvenir of their loyalty.
Everything was broken.
No matter what colour they painted the house or where they placed the furniture, my father’s surgical rage ensured that it always had the Feng-shui of an abattoir. The décor was early drug company incentive with a series of “Sigma Pharmaceuticals” medieval portraiture prints ornamenting the walls and a REAL skeleton in a box, under the stairs. We drank coffee and tea from a set of Triquilar ED mugs, my sister and I swapped “Bactrim” monster figurines like swap-cards and our pencil cases endorsed lithium. One Chanukah, for Christmas, I even got a tricycle with the compliments of Pfizer.
Just to add to the tenor of architectural menace, the bottom left wing served as a medical clinic, where my father practised and performed minor surgical procedures. It had its own “drug room” which served as a convenient, prescription free apothecary shop for any ailment or patient, either real or psychosomatic, to take advantage of. The front desk hosted a series of revolving receptionists, apart from one named Kaye whose co-dependent transference kept her in my fathers employ for over a decade.
Either that, or she was fucking him.
They wore mini skirts, cork wedges and blue eye-shadow or else the sack- cloth and pharmaceutical clogs of a paedophiliac spinster. Most could never endure the lunacy of our household for longer than a year. They didn’t realise that the job came with three neglected children, which attracted the creepy ones, an assortment of unkempt, occasionally vicious guinea pigs and the polite insistence that you sampled my mothers unappetising cooking at least once a shift along with my fathers abusive verbosity. People died in that clinic, not often, but often enough, waters broke and boils were lanced. Malignancies were diagnosed and referred on, venereal disease and unwanted pregnancies treated with discreet contempt. The transsexuals, who serviced the back streets of St Kilda, had to pay up front and I regularly stole my father’s stethoscope, which he wore like an albatross around his neck, to play with in our sand pit outside. I gave oxygen to the dog, showered with contraceptive diaphragms on my ears to keep the water out of them and watched, simultaneously repulsed and agog, as my sister’s gash on her knee was stitched, sans aesthetic, on the stairs.
I can see it now…my childhood home.
Crouching behind a synapse, taking cover beneath the passage of time. In the beginning, it was there in high definition, EVERY LIFETIME, looming like a monument to the karma it birthed, its pastel salmon complexion disguising the mortality it housed.

This is a story of brain rape.
There is no “us and them sentiment”, well not yet anyway, and I cannot write this, in pre-school vernacular, as a third world testament to the horrors I witnessed as a child. This is not an historical atrocity, after the fact, spelled out in endearingly short and childlike sentences. Those testaments to the horrors of dictators or Nazism or communism or just any old governmental schism, are usually thinly bound, darkly spined books that you are made to read if you want to matriculate. From Anne Frank through to Pol Pot, my story is not ghost written by an ornamental author or channelled through a translator to tell the tale of an over-arching essential human truth.
I have no“ brave message” for the world.
I will not be inspiring anyone to aid work overseas, I was not trafficked, I was not tortured, I was not killed. There is death, but no one gets decapitated. I was not forced to eat any of my husbands’ livers. Aid workers and N.G.O CEO’s, the twenty first century missionaries who converse in professional abbreviations, would discard my story as the narcissistic indulgence of a first world floosy, for whom nothing would ever have been good enough and no-one ever worth being happy for.
I am not the victim, the torturer, the dictator or the hero.
I am merely the aftermath.
And I am HERE.

Chapter two
(What happens after a holocaust)

Mrs Wulanski was a joy division program, with scarlet, vulva lips and brassy yellow hair. I re-member her effortlessly, not for any particular kindness or cruelty shown to me, but because of her Jane Mansfield looks and because, despite her life, she still wore red. I suspected she wasn’t Jewish, but rather a Polish convert that Mr Wulanski had married after a tragic scenario involving him in hiding, the Nazis, a haystack and a barn. They had a daughter named Shirley, who was an “on the spectrum” rescue child, white work coats and matching gold teeth. They compartmentalised their past, by running a delicatessen, flashing service industry smiles as they sliced sausages and cheese. Often I watched as Mrs Wulanski would point a crimson coloured finger nail, behind the display case to a particular delicacy my mother wanted, looking up for approval.Sometimes her hands would shake and her smile would broaden nervously, and on these occasions I could see that she was struggling to remember her lines. There was an afterthought of a son, whose infrequency prevents me from generating memories of, as it was their daughter and Auschwitz Birkenau that monopolised their time.
My hippocampus is opening an image as I type, of oversized, raven-haired spring loaded Shirley, immaculately dressed in a velvet pinafore, with white lace frilled bobby socks and nerves of medicated mania. So over-whelmed by her daily autism download, her experiences of repeating kindergarten repeatedly were adolescent scab pick raw, confusing and alone. She saw every group graduate to grade one without her as she remained fenced in behind wire mesh, until she got it right. If she had known about it at the time, she would have cut herself for relief.Instead, she frequently lashed out at other children, without malice, but still inflicting pain and, as a result, we were too scared to play with her. Undeservedly miscast in her role as the survivors “ love child”, Phillip Glass could have composed the soundtrack to her life.
Shirley, conceived as a victory march and incubated with more expectation than any human should inherit, is delivered, as a mishap, onto her own frequency.
With a furrow on her frontal lobe, pulsating with impropriety, her difference leaves her parents, bewildered, again, by the implacability of jinxed kismet that plays mind- games with their lives.

There is a world where business deals are sealed with sisters and daughters,
where females are bred to sweeten a covenant or incubate an heir. Where threats of arranged marriage and murder are formulated for crimes as inconsequential as answering back. Where being betrothed to the Rabbi’s sixth and final son, I contemplated, not as the insult it was intended to be, but as a possibility of escape, that I concealed, somewhere, in the crawlspace of my heart.
I am six years old.
We are at our weekly Sunday gathering at his parent’s house, so many descendants that lunch is served in shifts with the cousins muttering Stockholm syndrome devotions, to my Grandfather and Jerusalem, each attempting to out do the other for approval.
The boys always eat first.
The weekend before this my mother had fled his parent’s house, her faded denim flares swishing with determined hurt, her blonde head gently tilted in discussion with herself, as she escaped the madness of his hereditary for the safety of our Holden sedan. My father stood there, unwilling, unable, unwanting to defend her with rote inaction, replacing an instinct to protect, that he would never give the opportunity to evolve.
My grandfather had cursed her in Aramaic and spittle, while my father translated, verbatim, well as verbatim as Aramaic can get, in agreement with the wounding syllables being crop- dusted over his wife. She was accused of polluting his gene pool, birthing not one, but two daughters along the matrilineal fault line she had fractured in his family tree.
She was not the shidduch chosen for him, but an aberration of blonde haired, blue eyed Ashkenazi blasphemy, who begat girls, one after the other to the first son of the surviving son, whose father was Osher, Aaron, Yosef Ben- Chaim who begat Chaim, Aaron, Yosef Ben- Osher, who begat Osher, Aaron, Yosef, Ben- Chaim, who begat Esther, Malka Bat- Bracha and me.
Shulamit Elka Bat- Bracha, whose mother, whose gender, whose lineage have rendered her and her sister unprotected by the divine providence that graced the four walls, of Abraham and Sarah’s tent.
Amen.

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